BRING BACK THE 91% TAX RATE

A Drudge Headline with the above Paul Krugman photo.

  BRING BACK THE 91% TAX RATE

The headline links to a New York Times article written by Paul Krugman titled:

The Twinkie Manifesto

Astoundingly, Krugman argues for the restoration of the 91% tax rate. It's epic! Apparently, Krugman is trying to 'out Hollande Hollande the French socialist' who is praised for raising taxes on the wealthy to 70%. Forget that money and businesses are fleeing France as the French economy continues to sink into the dark abyss of statism and socialism. Krugman writes:

Yet in the 1950s incomes in the top bracket faced a marginal tax rate of 91, that’s right, 91 percent, while taxes on corporate profits were twice as large, relative to national income, as in recent years. The best estimates suggest that circa 1960 the top 0.01 percent of Americans paid an effective federal tax rate of more than 70 percent, twice what they pay today.

Krugman the diehard Keynesian statist economist conveniently leaves out highly relevant issues and facts including:

1.  The US did not have a giant welfare-warfare state in the 1950's and 1960's,
2.  Tax rates were lowered because WW II debts were being paid off.
3.  The dollar was still tethered to gold and the purchasing power of the dollar was strong.
4.  Free markets, relatively speaking, and an absence of the draconian regulatory state were delivering middle class prosperity and economic growth.

Nowhere in Krugman's incomprehensible and infantile rant does he even address the wars, foreign policy, the militarized police state, corporatism, rent seeking cronyism or the fact that entitlements now exceed tax receipts, here.

The era of middle class prosperity that Krugman so longs for had nothing whatsoever to do with high tax rates because America didn't have an economy killing re-distributionist state in the 1950's and 1960's.  The middle class was prosperous because of low taxes, a stable gold backed dollar with strong purchasing power, post WW II peace, a massive winding down of military spending and a high level of economic freedom.

The nation that Krugman opines for never existed and is pure 100% fiction.  So the only thing that Krugman's pathetically weak mind can latch onto is the raw emotion of the tired old class warfare drama.

Today, of course, the mansions, armies of servants and yachts are back, bigger than ever — and any hint of policies that might crimp plutocrats’ style is met with cries of “socialism.”

For starters, building mansions creates jobs, servants are voluntarily and gainfully employed and it takes a lot of knowledgeable high tech engineering and labor talent to build a modern yacht!  Shall we outlaw mansions, servants and yachts because Mr. Krugman clearly finds these things offensive?